Three women in Cleveland kidnapping case kept diaries detailing abuse

View full sizeAmanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were held captive for 10 years in a house in Cleveland, Ohio. On Thursday, Aug. 1, 2013, their confessed kidnapper, Ariel Castro, will be sentenced. (AP)

According to prosecutors, the diaries kept by the three women -- Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle, Knight -- tell how each were kidnapped and the continual abuse they suffered from their kidnapper, Ariel Castro.

Castro is set to be sentenced Thursday. He has pleaded guilty to 937 counts, including kidnapping, rape,
assault and aggravated murder. Castro agreed to plead guilty if prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty for a forced miscarriage. Castro stands to get life in prison plus 1,000 years.

CBS News is reporting that one of the three women will testify in live court. The two other may testify via video, though those plans have not been finalized, the story said.

According to The Associated Press, Castro, lured one of them into his Cleveland home with the promise of a puppy for her son and later locked all of them in a vehicle in his garage for three days when someone visited him, prosecutors said.

Castro, a former school bus driver, claimed he didn't have an exit strategy from his complicated double life and finally gave the women a chance to escape by leaving a door unlocked, they said in a court document.

Berry broke free in May and called for help, frantically telling an emergency dispatcher, "I've been kidnapped, and I've been missing for 10 years, and I'm, I'm here. I'm free now."

Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty said in a sentencing memorandum filed Wednesday that Castro, who chained his captives by their ankles and fed them only one meal a day, "admits his disgusting and inhuman conduct" but "remains remorseless for his actions." The memorandum says many of the charges in Castro's indictment reflect conduct documented by one of the women in her diary.

The women's diaries, the memorandum reports, "document abuse and life as a captive."

"The entries speak of forced sexual conduct, of being locked in a dark room, of anticipating the next session of abuse, of the dreams of someday escaping and being reunited with family, of being chained to a wall, of being held like a prisoner of war," the memorandum says.

The women disappeared separately between 2002 and 2004, when they were 14, 16 and 20 years old.

Many horrific details of the women's ordeal had already emerged, with one woman forced to wear a motorcycle helmet while chained in the basement and, after she tried to escape, having a vacuum cord wrapped around her neck.

Castro repeatedly starved and beat one of the victims each time she was pregnant, forcing her to miscarry five times.